That's the reason to avoid breaking your perception further, *long-term*. The effects don't end when your trip ends. It gradually dismantles you.

It's a tool that helps me make sense of it. Opposite to psychoactive substances, it keeps me together.

 

depends on the drugs and the life you have.
most people use coffee sucessfully all their life, few use heroin sucessfully though if it is pure and properly dosed it is no more fatal than any other opiod pain killer.

you are looking for a binary answer. yes/no, but life is a range of answers that varies depending on the values that accrue from lifestyle, decisions,friends,acquaintances, wealth or lack thereof, internal drive, intelligence and wisdom and ability to delay immediate pleasure for longer term gains. These are only a few of the many factors that influence our lives, a whole host of random factors come into play, ie you could get hit by a bus, or you could write a hit song, or you could find a brown paper bag with a 100,000$ in it.

Life is not something you control, it is akin to surfing, you ride the waves and try to keep your head above water. Some days you stay on the board, somedays the board hits you in the head.

Aging is learning how little you really control in life, and letting go of all the things you can't change and getting on with it.

Drugs often add another layer of difficulty without any long term benefit. No one ever wins the contest to see who can get the highest or stay high the longest. if you must use drugs, use the least amount possible to gain whatever benefit you feel you need.
but realize in many ways the drugs are not helping,but masking your problem and blocking any real solutions that may appear as you are likely too high to even realize solutions are all around you.

You basically sound like you are crying out for a change in your life and seeking chemistry to make that change. if it was working you wouldn't be still crying out for change. therefore we can conclude drugs are most likely not the solution you need.

Try other things like a change of scenerey - a day trip or a weekeend away and think about your life and don't spend it getting loaded, spend it thinking about how to resolve your problems. Try reading a book or two on people you hold in esteem and see how they handled the problems in their life. Read a book or two on religion and philsophy or at least great thought, they often insipire when you find others have traveled the same path you find yourself on. Audio books are all over youtube, if you find reading difficult.

you have to make the change to move yourself off the current path, the difficulty lies in making the effort and figuring out how and what to change. it will involve thinking before acting. spend you time thinking about it instead of thinking about how can i get high (again)...

alan watts - when the world changes stop clinging to it

master keys on youtube offers many audio books you may find interesting.

 

life is not a sprint, it is a marathon, save something for the end, you'll probably need it.

 

Get into Meditation. Nothing heals deeper than meditation. It may take time, but it's worth it. Get a detailed book like 'The Mind Illuminatred" and start doing it consistently. There is a Reddit community of people following this book. After you gain enough insights into your mind, you will be able to see the real world as it is, without the mental constructions. Best of luck..

 

They are still doing surgical removals (resection) of (sometimes quite substantial) brain areas in severe cases of epilepsy, which is not too different from lobotomy. Even entirely cutting off the left and right brain hemisphere is a common procedure.

I find this ethically questionable, since those doctors doing those procedures have no freaking clue how this will affect mental and cognitive functioning in the patients. They might solve one issue (if anything at all), but cause a dozen new ones, since our brain is highly interconnected and any disruption in the neural networks can lead to severe issues in subtle or more obvious domains of cognition.

 

Last edited: Feb 16, 2024

I was lucky not to get any substance addiction, since my early experiments with drugs discouraged me from using them further. Still, I would say that I have some problematic substance and non-substance uses. I'm kind of addicted to sugar, which can lead to diabetes and all kinds of negative health outcomes in the mid- to long run. Not to mention various types of screen addictions, that take away much of my time and energy, that I could otherwise use more productively.

I guess everyone has some kind of bad habit / addiction, but I believe that drugs are particularly bad, since they very directly mess with the body and mental faculties.

 

Sugar is relative mildly psychoactive, but relative highly addictive. Most used psychoactive substance is probably coffee / caffeine. It's widely used, since it's benefits typically outweigh it's side effects (= it doesn't cause severe problems to the user).

 

double post

 

Last edited: Feb 16, 2024

Your a fucking prophet! Just this afternoon I wrote what I thought was an amazing song and sent it right away to my agent who turned it onto Chris Martin while hanging out at his pool (his neighbor) from Coldplay who immediately said that he's recording it on their next album, and I was stoked so went out for a run to burn off all that excess frenetic energy, and while waiting for traffic to pass to cross the street noticed a brown paper bag lying in the roadway, and when I picked it up there seemed to be about 20 stacks of 200 Swiss Franc bills...and when I woke up in the hospital the nurse told me that I was hit by a bus. Those that found me lying on the ground took all the money so I hope my agent gets me the best deal possible.

 

kick a litle somthin my way....

 

What substances have you tried before?

How can you be so sure the sense you're making with music isn't actually bad for you?

If music were deteriorating to your perception of the world, could you be able to tell?

It is known that some pieces of art, musical ones included, have had really negative effects on people's minds. Not saying they caused it (maybe they did, can't really know) but art can throw people in really dark spirals.

If someone said "see, art is bad for you, you shouldn't do it" based on this, would you agree?

 

Last edited: Feb 16, 2024

or if its shorter, just the ones you haven't tried...

 

if you've got an interest, there is a good youtube on the 2 brains - bought the book but haven't made it through that thing it 600 odd pages long..The master and his emissary - IAIN McGILCHRIST..

 

Why would my experience even be relevant? There's hard scientific evidence for substance abuse harm (Do I even need to post sources on this? just keeping their principles of operation in mind is enough to understand how destructive most of them are.) and for music practicing benefit (https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/why_and_how_music_moves_us, notice the sources. There's also a more recent study they don't mention which shows that people with Alzheimer's progressed past the point of speech loss can react emotionally to music and even sing along).
As for my own history with substances, I get severe anxiety attacks from prescribed sedatives, so I'm pretty sure anything more potent would just straight up turn me into a vegetable one way or another.

 

Loved that, thanks.

 

If you have health issues that require medication you need to take them, if it's drugs then get help, life is precious.

 

Your experience would be relevant but you have none

This kind of generalization is beyond absurd. Yeah, there's "hard" scientific evidence for substance abuse harm. You can also die if you drink too much water. According to your logic, then, one shouldn't ever drink water ("the effects don't end when your glass is empty").

Before you say "water is an indispensable sustenance for our survival, drugs are not, your comparison makes no sense" the key word here is abuse, not necessity.

I can cite numerous studies on the benefits of psychedelics for mental therapy. People have been studying this since the late 50s, although governments tried to prevent them for decades now, but it's been shown time after time that psychedelics like LSD, Psilocybin, Mescaline, Ketamine and even MDMA can be :

1- used therapeutically for a wide range of aliments, ranging from c-PTSD to Major Depressive Disorder

and

2- be far more effective than any existing therapeutic tool.

Why wouldn't you at least try to have a fair and balanced view on the subject by acknowledging these studies (along with ENDLESS personal accounts of positive drug use from MILLIONS of people across almost a century) instead of just latching on to

There are also cases where paralyzed people regain motor control when they take Zolpidem (Ambien), a hypnotic sedative, and go back to paralysis when the effects wear out. Yay for Ambien, I guess?

“If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves.”
-Mark Twain

 

I stopped counting around 60.

 

@triggerflipper my friend, with no disrespect, don't you think we both might be a little subjective on the matter?
I readily admit that I personally don't want to let anything that alters my conscious processes or induces chemical reactions that otherwise come from real world-related feelings into my brain. But I also strictly speak about *abuse* cases, as others I'm not supposed to even notice from the outside, if I get it right. The issue I see in this light is that first thing most psychoactive substances do is weaken your conscientiousness, making it easier to slip into abuse and harder to do something useful that requires effort. And I'm not talking about medical cases where the alternative is worse either, because first, the alternative is worse, and second, it's supposed to be under a professional supervision, at least in theory.

Regarding water, you need to drink 16 liters of water at once to get water poisoning. And I don't even know what you need to do to get music poisoning. Listen to our contemporary Country music, I guess? Not sure, not trying that either :D

Oh, and I did get a bad trip from cannabis once. We all smoked the same shit, and I stared at the sun for I think 10 minutes cause I thought my shadow wants to kill me. Meanwhile others just looked at me and laughed.
Also I don't get drunk. We tested it in university, I drank half a bottle of vodka in small sips and while it affected my motorics in predictable ways, it did nothing to my conscience. Then I started feeling bad in my liver and stopped. The next day was also as expected. My comrades were there and sober to verify it all.
And then yeah, three different sedatives that my psychiatrist prescribed all were ending up in total loss of sleep and anxiety attacks. So I at least treat my substances responsibly when it comes to *me* by not using any.

 

Last edited: Feb 17, 2024

The terms "drugs" and "medicines" are often used interchangeably, but they do have distinct meanings.
We are discussing illegal drugs here, I suppose.
Medicines are used to treat, prevent, alleviate symptoms of a disease or condition or diagnose disease. They typically undergo rigorous testing and clinical trials to ensure safety, quality, and efficacy, often regulated by government agencies. Medicines are generally expected to be safe and effective for their intended use. Medicines are prescribed or recommended by healthcare professionals to address specific health needs and conditions.
On the other hand, the term "illegal drug" refers to any substance that causes a physiological change and alters the mind when introduced into the body at the will of a person. Drugs may have therapeutic effects, such as relieving pain or treating illness, but should be prescribed by a doctor in those cases. On the other side, illegal drugs are substances with no accepted medical use and are often associated with addiction and harm. In summary, while all medicines are drugs, not all drugs are medicines. Illegal drugs are mostly not medicines at all.